Yielding
by jumbled thoughts keep me up
Summary: Kidou's visit at the hospital dredges up some memories of Genda's. Something he wants to keep buried. Forever.


_**Yielding**_

**A/N: I don't own Inazuma Eleven. That particular honor belongs to Level-5.**

Genda woke to the feeling of scratchy sheets against his face and the slightly stinging smell of sanitizer in the air. He fluttered his eyes, and was taken aback by the immediate sunlight glaring into his blue-gray eyes.

"Oh thank God." Genda squinted to his left, and through the beams of the cutting light, he managed to make out blue goggles and a red jacket.

"Kidou," he whispered. He cleared his throat and opened his eyes a little further. Brown dreadlocks and sharp features came into view. "What are you doing here?"

"Waiting for you to wake up, of course," Kidou said, chuckling slightly. He brushed back the brown bangs falling across Genda's face. "Your hair's a mess by the way."

Genda rolled his eyes and sat up slowly. Almost immediately, he groaned. After the match against Zeus Junior, the impacts from their continuous shoots had reverberated down to his back and legs, rendering him unable to even walk properly for two weeks. Now nearing the end of the third week, Genda still felt the pangs of pain twinge as he moved.

"I thought you would've been practicing. You know, with Raimon." He couldn't help the trace of envy and resentment that leaked into the simple sentence. From the abrupt downward twist of Kidou's lips, he could tell that the note of jealousy had not been missed by the genius playmaker.

"I'm going back after lunch. Our next match is against Kidokawa Seishuu. If we beat them, it's a straight path to the finals—and to Zeus," Kidou told him. "Genda, believe me, I want revenge just as much as you and everyone else does. What I'm doing is for the good of the team. This is my chance to do something about the predicament." Genda nodded. He knew that of course. With him and the rest of the team stuck in the hospital nursing injuries, this was the best course of action for Kidou to take. He shouldn't blame him. This wasn't his fault. If anything, it was because Genda himself was too weak to stand up against Aphrodi and his shoots.

_Number one goalkeeper my foot,_ he scoffed internally. Ten goals past him into the net he had tried to guard so zealously. He had never felt so helpless, so useless. As a goalkeeper, he had failed his duty by letting ten goals into his domain, his net. He fantasized silently for a while about Sakuma kicking Aphrodi's head into Zeus's net ten times, twenty times, a hundred times.

"Maybe it's time to wash off the tattoos," Kidou said quietly, eyeing the orange stripes that ran across the lower half of Genda's face, from his eyes to the sides of his face, and then reaching out to trace them. He smiled a little as Genda's skin tone reddened under his fingertips.

"I—I, uh, I can't," Genda managed to choke out. _His hand's so soft_, he thought as Kidou cupped his right cheek.

Kidou raised his eyebrows. "You never did tell me the story behind these. Care to enlighten me as to why you can't wash them off?"

Genda frowned. It was true that he had never told anyone about his tattoos—it was from a part of his childhood history that he didn't share lightly with anyone, not even Kidou, who had been his best friend since the day they both tried out for the soccer team.

_This is Kidou we're talking about_, Genda thought. _If I can't trust him to keep this secret, then there's no one left to trust._

He took a deep breath. "I was a kid—no more than six, I think. Give or take a year or so. My mother was painting again, and it was beautiful. Reds and yellows and oranges and pinks spread out over the canvas, like the sunset."

"_Mommy? What are you painting?" A six-year-old Koujirou dimpled adorably at his mother. She was a woman in her early thirties, with a kind, heart-shaped face and a gentle smile._

"_It's a piece called _Resilience_, darling. Look at the colors and tell me what you see." Holding out his arms, young Koujirou was lifted up by his mother to get a better look at the painting, his eyes drinking in the colors, hard on hard, as if they were combating against each other in a hypnotizing spiraling pattern. Confusingly enough, the center of the canvas remained a perfect white circle._

"_It looks like the colors are fighting each other, Mommy. But what's the circle in the middle mean?" His mother smiled and pressed her lips to his unruly brown hair._

"_You're absolutely right, my little lion," she whispered into his ear. "The colors are fighting each other, engaged in endless combat, none giving in to another. But the fight couldn't possibly go on forever, which means that one must learn to yield. In the end, the yielder often receives a bargain in their best interest, as a sort of compensation for ceding. That, darling—" she said, brushing the circle with a flurry of paint, "is how you win a fight." Now the circle had been filled in with a bright, vibrant orange. "Yielding is something you must understand, Koujirou." She set her child down, and dipping her thumbs into the orange paint bottle, she streaked two lines of paint on Koujirou's face, one on each side, leaving her son giggling. _

"_It never does to give up without a fight, but when the fight goes on too long, it's time to yield," she murmured, smiling softly, with the most of tender of looks in her eyes as she looked down at her son._

"She died in a car crash two days later," Genda ended quietly. "This is a sort of reminder of her great compassion and the lessons she taught me. It's helped me grow in ways I can't begin to describe." He looked up to find Kidou crying. It wasn't the pitying sort of crying, it was the kind of crying that made you realize that felt your own pain as well, and the he felt it inside his heart as well. That deep, gut-wrenching hole that would stay with you forever.

"I—Genda, I don't know what to say." Kidou was quiet for a minute, then reached over to squeeze his hand, tears still streaming down his face. "Thank you," he whispered. "Thank you for sharing this with me. You can't imagine how much this means to me."

Genda's eyes softened, and his mouth widened into a slight smile. "Jesus, Kidou, you're a wreck. Would you man up and quit your crying? And here I thought you were the hardened, ice-cold captain of Teikoku Academy's soccer team," he teased. Kidou smirked a little, and wiped away his tears.

"Don't be an asshole," he muttered, punching his arm, causing the goalkeeper to wince in pain.

Genda glanced at the clock. "It's almost two. Shouldn't you be meeting up with Raimon by now?" Kidou's eyes widened as he saw the minute hand strike fifty.

"Crap!" he hissed, grabbing his satchel and slinging it across his chest. "Same time tomorrow?" he grinned at his best friend before giving him a hasty wave and rushing out the door.

After a beat of silence, Genda picked up his pillow and threw it a bed over.

"Oi, Sakuma. Wake up, I'm bored as hell."

**A/N: Wow. It's been forever. *****crickets sound***** Is it just me, or has this fandom grown?! Excuse me for feeling a bit nervous here :P Feeling like a newbie all over again.**

** ANYWAYS! I'm back (sort of) with an altogether not terrible one-shot, again, cooked up at three in the morning. Lesson here: never expect much from me. So anyways, it's been something close to six months since I posted, so I'm hoping this serves as a pretty glorious piece celebrating my return and the end of my unexpected hiatus. What can I say? School's a bitch. As usual, read and review and I'll love you all forever. Flames will be used to fuel Fat Amy's hate fire (if you got the reference, you're awesome and I love you).**


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